With the widespread growth of the Internet and advances in communication technology, users of communication devices can conveniently gain access to a virtually unlimited quantity of information and services. This is especially true with wireless communication devices, such as cell phones and wirelessly-equipped personal digital assistants for instance, which provide users with access to such information from virtually any location where wireless coverage exists.
One way for users to most conveniently access content is to subscribe to a service where content is automatically transmitted to their devices. In an increasingly common arrangement, for instance, a server may be set to periodically transmit the latest version of particular content to subscriber devices. That way, when a user seeks to access content, the user can conveniently access the latest received version of the content from local data storage, without the need to wait for the content to download the content at the time. Further, such automated transmission of content can be particularly useful with wireless communications, where devices tend to have sporadic or limited network connectivity. In that context, a wireless communication device may receive content updates while online, and a user of the device may thereafter access the updated content from local data storage regardless of whether the device is online or offline at the time.
Such automatic transmissions of content can be used for various purposes. By way of example, automatic content transmissions can be used to maintain one or more “content-channels” on a communication device. In practice, the communication device may be programmed with a channel-presentation program that allows a user to selectively view content of one or more channels (akin to TV channels), each of which may be focused on a particular subject (such as sports, weather, or pop-music, for instance). For each channel, a network server may be arranged to periodically push the latest channel content to the device. Conveniently, whenever a user of the device then selects a desired channel to view, the channel-presentation program can present the user with the latest set of content that was downloaded for that channel, without having to wait for the device to download the content.
As another example, automatic content transmissions can be used to maintain on a communication device an up-to-date content-catalog, i.e., a listing of downloadable-content, such as content that is available for free-download or for purchase. Rather than maintaining such a content-catalog strictly online and requiring real-time online browsing through the catalog, the device can maintain a local copy of the content catalog. To facilitate this, a network server (e.g., a content server) may be programmed to periodically transmit the latest version of the content-catalog to the device. Conveniently, when a user of the device seeks to view the content-catalog, the user could view the up-to-date local copy without having to wait for the device to download the catalog from the server.